Comic Review: The Problem with Susan and Other Stories HC (Dark Horse)

Dark Horse Comics releases a graphic novel which is taking you for a ride of a dream world in The Problem of Susan and Other Stories.

Okay, I do have some thoughts about this comic, and the question is: What is Susan’s problem? Nonetheless, this is actually like the 24 Panels comic that I’ve read on Image, but on this story is about how to write a story or poem and finding inspiration. If you’ve ever been in a creating writing class, you’d get the point of having a thought about writing a story. So anyway if this story would be something related to her dreams, but anyone would experience that to know if you dreamed something, you might write a list down on your notebook. Maybe I would bring out some part of me for writing this, I call it “The guy who interpreted his own comic reviews.”

So where do I begin? Let’s start with the front cover. Wow, isn’t it a fabulous way to illustrate this kind of cover? There we have the girl who is minding her own business, reading a book like she’s a care in the world, but right above the girl, she actually brings out her imagination, dreaming in some fantasy world. But that’s actually the point of the cover because once she starts reading it, she starts to have such raw imagination in her mind as if she actually inspires the story. The monsters on the front cover, almost seemed that they’re all dead, except for those two monsters that looked like deities, and it almost seemed that her dream took place on a battlefield. Wow, I’ve never seen such an illustration portraying the girl’s thoughts. And the title though, it almost seemed that it was designed with some Indian font lettering, I mean if you looked at the title of the movie, Aladdin it almost seemed familiar, right? And this graphic novel is made by Neil Gaiman, the same author who wrote some several stories for Dark Horse Comics, but seriously, he wrote so many other stories, but suddenly when this comic came out, it supposed to span as an essential of the comic series.

The story is just like 24 Panels where every writer and artists make some short stories and debut it on a single graphic novel. However, according to the comic, this comic acknowledges having “Two stories and two poems.” This is actually an adaptation comic for the readers to enjoy and learn more about Gaiman’s stories. All the artists that were drawn together for her to make some short stories are some famous comic artists like P. Craig Russell, Scott Hampton, and Paul Chadwick. What I do like about this comic is that artists like them are most likely bring attention to the readers to read this comic as an aspiration for the author and the artists around, because Gaiman wrote some great stories, while the other professional artists tend to have some creativity to create a fantasy world based on its dreams, reality, and imagination. For Gaiman fans, this is actually a must-read graphic novel with four comic adaptation of short stories, including the story of an elderly college professor who dreamed about some battlefield which is actually the main comic of Susan, the father tells the daughter the story of Goldilocks who looked like Maria Renard from Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, and of course, aliens, zombies, and I don’t know, all these stories are basically made up from their imaginations. But yes, every story that you’ll get is everything based on their imagination and dreams, there’s nothing much more to say. If you rather want to read another of Gaiman’s stories then this one is for you.